How to improve libraries
Seth Godin has a big idea about libraries. Apparently, libraries are dying, dead, in some state of decomposition, or just teetering on the edge. I’m quite concerned. Does this mean I get to keep the books I have out or do they need them back in order to bury them alongside the corpses of the poor librarians who went down with the poor ship?
So, then, the idea that a library will exist in order for citizens interested in furthering their education - well, yes, that’s got to go. I’m not sure why, but it just has to. That will definitely die, apparently. What, then, is the use of libraries.
Godin: The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.
Sounds pretty good. People who will teach others, connect people together and help people understand and use information. Sounds sort of what like teachers do. And lecturers. And intellectuals. And, well, authors and - heaven help us! - marketing coaches and social media gurus.
The future of libraries is… some sort-of school/university/adult learning college hybrid. Nothing wrong with that. I’m a big fan of universities and, when not run by bureaucratic lunatics, schools and institutions of lifelong learning. And, well, it wasn’t teachers or lecturers who got us into Great Depression 2.0 either. Hooray for teachers! It’s a sign of a civilized society that we share knowledge and teach each other. So, let’s grant that we should do more of it. And then let’s grant that it’s effective and we have more people who have the skills to find and use information intelligently.
Where, then, do the curious learners go to aggressively find that information? Wikipedia? Well, okay - that’s not bad, but on some fairly important topics, it’ll only give you a very light coating of information. Blogs? Yeah, if you want to read the opinions of people like Seth Godin or see LOLCATS. How about books? What, then, of the books that are too expensive to purchase, or you only want to read once? What of the people who cannot afford to buy books? Or haven’t got Internet connections?
The library, remember, has no books in it since The information is free now
. To illustrate this important point, I went to my rather modest bookshelves and picked out some books. Let’s see: Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism. You can get it online, if you are willing to download a PDF off a file-sharing site. But that doesn’t really replace the library, does it? Okay, let’s try another. Grondin’s biography of Hans-George Gadamer. You can read a review of it online. And it’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Okay, let’s try something easy - Jonathan Dancy’s Contemporary Epistemology, a great little book on the basics of epistemology. Uh, no. Can’t get that online. I guess information might not be free.
Plenty of the things I read on a daily basis aren’t online. Not even if you use file sharing networks and play fast and loose with the law. I’m very glad that when I go into the library it contains books rather than people like Seth Godin connecting
me. That’d be pretty horrible.
